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Livni accused of libeling three judges

MK Tzipi Livni (Zionist Union) was involved in besmirching three male District Court judges when she was serving as Justice Minister, according to the News1 website.

The respected investigative website published a follow-up report Thursday after revealing earlier in the week that Roni Aloni-Sedovnik, a lawyer who specializes in representing victims and alleged victims of sexual assaults, had libeled the three judges in 2013.

At the time, Aloni-Sedovnik claimed that the judges had humiliated a young woman who had been sexually assaulted by four Arabs, one of whom raped her. She claimed that the defense attorney and the judges in the trial of the assailants made the girl, who was about 15 at the time, get down on the floor in the middle of the courtroom and demonstrate the movements of the defendant who raped her. She further claimed that the girl ran out of the courtroom, sobbing, and that the defense attorney shouted at her as she ran out that she was lying.

This made for sensational headlines and the judges came under a severe shaming attack in the press. As Justice Minister, Livni did not bother to check if Aloni-Sedovnik’s charges against the judges were accurate, and instead ordered Court Ombudsman Goldberg to conduct an inquiry into the allegations, thus lending them credence.

Eventually, Goldberg and then-Supreme Court President Asher Grunis determined that the judges did not do what Aloni-Sedovnik had accused them of, but the damage had been done and the media had already moved on to other stories.

This week, the Supreme Court determined that Aloni-Sedovnik had been involved in fabricating rape charges against a lawyer in a scheme that she concocted with four women who sought to harm the lawyer, and a public relations guru named Moti Moral – who was the PR man of MK Yitzhak Herzog (Zionist Union) before he fired him this week over the revelation.

This led News1 to reopen the older case involving Aloni-Sedovnik and to reveal the minutes of the court session in which the girl she represented had supposedly been humiliated. The minutes reveal that she was never asked to demonstrate the movements of the rapist, and that she had volunteered to demonstrate the position in which he had been crouching, to explain how he raped her.

News1 determined that Aloni-Sedovnik had lied about the court session – which she had not even been present at, since she did not represent the victim at the time – and that this lie was then abetted by Livni. If she had bothered to read the court protocol before making statements to the press and ordering an inquiry, said the outlet, she would have realized that the accusations were false.

The website further names leftist journalist Raviv Drucker of assisting Aloni-Sedovnik in spreading the libelous accusations against the three judges.